


Visitation Rites

by ambyr



Category: Xenogenesis Series - Octavia E. Butler
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, Gen, Minor Character(s), Parents & Children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 04:15:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/605714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambyr/pseuds/ambyr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are many things Margit doesn't understand about her human father. She keeps trying, all the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Visitation Rites

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jactrades](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jactrades/gifts).



> Vidor is a minor character in _Dawn_ ; Margita is a minor character in _Adulthood Rites_. This fic is set between the two books. Thanks due to Elfwreck for the beta.

Margit had been very young when Vidor left Lo—perhaps nine months, perhaps ten; still a baby, as humans reckoned things—but she remembered. Of course she remembered. Forgetting was a human thing.

There had been shouting, and a bowl slammed against the table, and then more shouting—Lilith screaming, furious, as the door to their home slowly irised closed and shut off the sound of Vidor’s clipped stride. Margit pulled in on herself, trying to cover her nodules with her arms and legs, but she couldn’t shut out the noise.

Nikanj’s scent, wafting into the room before it, was calming. Margit wanted to crawl to it, but it had already looped its sensory arms around Lilith, and she did not want to be near Lilith, not now when she was sharp and loud.

The shouting stopped. Lilith’s breathing calmed, and she half-turned to sink her head against Nikanj’s chest.

“Damn it, Nikanj, I have a right to be angry.” The fury was gone. She sounded resigned.

“You’re scaring the children,” it said. 

Lilith pulled away from it—slowly, giving it time to untangle its tentacles from her flesh—and went over to crouch down by Margit.

“I’m sorry. Sorry you had to hear that.”

Margit slowly uncoiled herself and pressed the nodules at the base of her wrist against Lilith, trying to taste whether the anger was gone. It was, but there were other things remaining, things she didn’t understand. Lilith scooped Margit up and held her against her chest, letting her make contact in more places. It didn’t help. Some things were too human.

“When will Father come back?” He had done this before—gone to stay in the guest house for a few days, then returned—but it had never been so loud.

Lilith looked at Nikanj, but the ooloi said nothing. Even its tentacles were still, giving nothing away with movement or scent.

“He’s not coming back, Margit. He’s going to another village.”

Lilith’s words tasted true. Margit’s nodules rippled with confusion. “But his family is here.” 

“He’s had other families. No doubt he will again. Six wives, Christ. I knew that going in.” Lilith shook her head. “Other ooloi, too.”

Margit stiffened in shock. She, too, turned to look at Nikanj. Ooloi were acquisitive; ooloi were bound to their mates. “How could you take him? How can you let him go?”

Nikanj had come closer to them to loop its arms around both her and Lilith, and Margit pressed closer eagerly, aligning her nodules with its tentacles to seek answers.

“Human males are different, Eka. They don’t bond in the same way. You’ll see, when you’re older.”

It made no sense to her. But Vidor was still gone.

* * *

He came back a year later, smelling of another ooloi. The doors in Lo would no longer open to him, and he had to wait outside their home until she came toddling out. She had only just learned to walk. There had been enough familiar in his scent to draw her out, but once there she stopped, uncertain. He no longer felt like family, but he _looked_ like Vidor, like the man who had spun her in a circle until she was giddy and laughing and held her over his head so she could taste the trees that ringed Lilith’s garden.

Her father stared back at her. “You’re walking now,” he said, entirely unnecessary—but humans often spoke the obvious, as though it would not be true unless acknowledged. He was holding something, a cluster of bright red berries split to reveal black and white cores, and he offered it to her.

“It’s called guarana,” he told her, as she took it from him uncertainly. “I know you like trying new things. It grows near my new village, and people make tea with it.”

Margit held it delicately between her seven fingers, pressing it against the nodules on her wrist to taste it at the same time that she brought it to her mouth to take a bite. Vidor didn’t scold her for eating the stem with the fruit, as other humans might have; he had always been good at that.

It was not a pleasant favor. There was something in it that she found toxic, something that had chased away the bugs whose dead shells usually provided her with a source of protein. But it would not kill her, or a human, and so Margit swallowed. It seemed important to Vidor. After, she handed the rest of the berries back to him.

“Thank you,” she remembered to say.

“I suppose it’s a lot of food for someone so small,” Vidor said in a teasing tone. She did not correct him. He tucked the berries back in his satchel and crouched down next to her. “May I pick you up?”

He still smelled wrong. But she missed the way his arms had felt—he had always been careful not to pinch or pull at her nodules—and his deliberate movements, so much slower than Lilith’s sharp decisiveness. Margit nodded.

* * *

After that, he came more often, never less than every four or five months. Dichaan and Ahajas were uncomfortable with Vidor’s visits, and Nikanj took care to absent itself entirely before his arrival. Even Lo’s other Oankali did not like to engage with him. They did not understand why he returned when his mates were clearly elsewhere, but there was more to it than that.

“They’re cautious,” Nikanj told Margit when she asked it. “It’s a new thing, bonding not for life. We might trade for it. We might not. No one is sure how it would work for us. We need to trade to survive, but a big trade—it makes people uneasy. They want more time to observe how it works. In a way, you’re an experiment, Eka.”

Margit decided she did not mind being an experiment. She liked Vidor’s visits, liked the things he brought her and the stories he told. If she tried hard enough she could sense, under the scents of his new mates, the part that smelled like her. She took to staying at Leah and Wray’s guesthouse with him, because there were no Oankali there to be distressed by Vidor’s presence and Vidor could open the doors. It also meant he did not have to see Lilith. Lilith was, curiously, the most strongly in favor of Vidor’s visits, but she did not like to talk with him.

Vidor had been a lawyer, before the Oankali came. She did not entirely understand the word, but she knew it had something to do with debate, with consensus-speaking. He spoke sometimes of laws about children, of his right to see her. Sometimes, in the early visits, she worried that he only came because of this “right,” that he was trying to prove something to Lilith. But that would not have explained the way his face lit up when he saw her, or how eagerly he hugged her. He brought her more strange fruits to taste, and other things—a carved wooden doll, a necklace of drilled tagua nuts, a drawing of a human city from before the Oankali came.

She did not know what to do with the doll other than taste it, and the varnish Vidor had used to give it a glossy texture made its flavor strange and bitter. She did not like the way the necklace rubbed against the nodules on her neck. She could not see the rise and fall of towers in the plain lines on flat paper. But she liked the way Vidor felt when he gave them to her: proud, accomplished, anxious for her response. She kept them in her room because they reminded her of Vidor, and because she thought, if she studied them enough, she might be able to understand what they meant to him.

The purpose of the doll remained impenetrable, and the necklace was always heavy and grating, but the more she stared at the picture the more she thought she could see a pattern somewhere in its scratched surface. It reminded her of a tree she had seen once, while she was out gathering plants with Ahajas, with exposed roots that formed arches high enough for her to walk through.

* * *

“I have something to show you,” she told her father the next time he visited, after he had finished telling her about a dispute between humans at his new village that he had been called on to resolve.

“Something you made me?” he asked. He sounded hopeful. Margit frowned. It had not occurred to her that he might want his gifts returned in that way. 

“No. Something I saw. It looked like the picture you gave me.” Said that way, it sounded foolish, but he sat up straighter and looked at her with wider eyes: excitement. Margit was proud of herself for her understanding of what a human might like. “It’s in the jungle. I can show you the way.”

She was still too small to walk far or push through the heaviest brush, so once they left the boundaries of Lo, Vidor swung Margit up on his shoulders. He was shorter than her other four parents, but she still appreciated the view. Branches brushed past her face, and she tasted each of them in turn. She was not truly hungry, but she enjoyed the flavors and they helped her remember where she was and which way to tell Vidor to turn.

Margit was so focused on finding the way that she did not notice the viper until Vidor stumbled and fell. She went tumbling with him, and for a moment sensed nothing but pain as the nodules on her wrist and elbow slammed into a rock. When her senses cleared, Vidor was crouched on the ground, and the snake was arched for another strike. She scrambled across the jungle floor on two legs and one arm, throwing her free hand toward the snake. The nodules on her wrist flexed and pulsed, and the snake fell back, stung.

It would die, Margit knew. She was not an ooloi, with the control to cause only sleep or paralysis. She regretted the necessity, but she was already moving toward Vidor, whose skin was graying to match her own natural tone. The bite was on his calf, above the thick material of his boots.

“Be careful,” he told her, speech slurred, “the snake—”

“It’s fine.” No, it wasn’t fine; it was dead, but she couldn’t worry about that now. “It’s safe. Stay still.” 

She bent over Vidor and pressed her wrists to either side of the bite, which was bleeding more than such a small wound should. She had seen Ahajas do this to Lilith, once, but Margit had been too young to link with her and observe what she was doing directly. She hoped she had understood enough. She let her nodules expand and press into Vidor’s flesh, encouraging it to expel the venom. He was already slipping into unconsciousness, which helped. The venom had damaged his tissues in ways that she did not understand, and was afraid to try to fix. An ooloi would have to finish the work, but she thought she could make him stable enough to return safely to town.

Gradually, he began to wake up. It had only been his body’s natural state of shock that had kept him unconscious; she did not know how to encourage sleep without hurting him, and anyway had been too focused on the venom to think of trying. She separated her nodules from him just in time, before he jerked away and sat up, blinking.

“Don’t do that!” Margit had never heard her father’s voice so harsh, and she curled her arms around her knees reflexively. Then his hand dropped to the bite, still sticky with blood. “What—?”

She had seen humans like this before, confused from shock. “It bit you. I think I stopped it from hurting you more. But you need to see an ooloi.” She didn’t care if Nikanj wanted to remain distant from Vidor; she would _make_ it come. She had not felt so shaken since the night Vidor left Lilith.

“Thank you. I’m sorry, lelkem. I shouldn’t have shouted at you.” He reached out a hand toward her, and she went to him, edging around the corpse of the snake. He pulled her tight against his uninjured side. “I don’t—like the way it feels. Being worked on. But you saved me.” He sounded unbelieving. Humans often had difficulty with how early construct children could think and act on their own. “Thank you.”

“You didn’t mind Nikanj. Or—or your new ooloi.” She had never met it and did not know its name. The phrase “new ooloi” felt alien to her. It was not something she could have said in Oankali.

Vidor grimaced as he pushed himself to his feet. He had to grab a tree to steady his balance, but eventually he stopped swaying. “You know ooloi. They change you, make you want it. I minded very much at first. I wanted to kill it.”

That was another thing that could not be translated to Oankali. But he had meant it. Margit froze. She had been following Vidor, who was too weak to carry her, as he walked in slow, limping steps back toward Lo. It took him several paces to realize she had stopped and turn back toward her.

“That was too much to burden you with, wasn’t it? One minute you’re saving me and the next you’re just a kid.” Vidor slumped against a tree, too tired to remain upright without the momentum of walking to keep him going. “My kid. I wanted to kill it when I first met it, yeah. I wanted to kill all the Oankali. You’ll never understand what they did to us, what it means to us. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, lelkem. You and my other kids, but especially you.”

She did not understand how both things could be true at once, and hung back, frightened.

“Margita,” said Vidor carefully, “I would never hurt you. Do you believe me?”

She wanted to believe him, but she remembered how he had shouted at her, just minutes before. If he had pulled away a moment sooner, he would have hurt her, and terribly so. “I don’t know.”

“You can sense it, right? If you go deep enough?”

“Yes. But we don’t have time. You need an ooloi.” If she focused on that, she did not have to think about what he had said about Nikanj.

“I’m never going to brave enough to do this, any other time. I hate it. Come here. Touch—taste me. Explore.” He pushed away from the tree and began walking toward her, arms open.

She could not bear to watch him taking steps backward, not when they had so much further to go to Lo. She went to him and wrapped both arms around his legs. It was different, sinking into him when he was conscious and aware of it. He trembled, and there was a sour tang of fear when her nodules penetrated his skin. She did not know how to sooth it away. She could still feel the effects of the venom that she had not managed to erase, the way it had begun to reach toward his organs. It felt _wrong_ , wrong in a way that made her want to break away and take him to an ooloi immediately.

“You need Nikanj,” she said. The disgust that flooded through Vidor was immediate, bitter to her taste. “Or your ooloi?” More unease, but leavened by desire. The mixture was unpleasant—but strangely intoxicating. She thought she understood the ooloi pull toward humans, then, the need to soothe and heal and fix something so obviously out of balance.

“After you’re done,” he said, stubborn. “Take what you need, first.” And there was his love for her, his need to be understood by her, to be loved in return. She realized suddenly that his care to never touch her nodules had not been driven, as she thought, by a desire not to hurt the delicate flesh. He had been afraid of them, avoiding them. But he was willing to do this to reassure her. She dug deeper, fascinated by the contradictions that threaded through him, by the ways he was like and unlike her.

She was reluctant, in the end, to pull back. She understood now that he would never allow such a close joining again. But he needed healing. She slowly let their flesh separate.

“I know you won’t hurt me,” Margit told Vidor. “You know Nikanj won’t hurt you, don’t you?”

He made a sound that might have been a laugh. “It already has, lelkem. But fair is fair. It gave me you.”

* * *

It was not, in the end, Nikanj that healed Vidor but Tehkorahs, who was nearest to them when they stumbled out of the jungle. Margit thought maybe it was better that way. Perhaps part of this new thing, this mating not for life, was staying away from one’s old mates. And he did not have the history with Tehkorahs that he had with Nikanj, the wanting-to-kill that still made her shudder to think about.

When she shared this thought with Tehkorahs, after Vidor was dozing in an ooloi-induced sleep, it hesitated. “He has the same history with me,” it said at last, sending images and scents to her through the tentacles pressed against her skin. They were violent images, and she tried to pull away. It tempered them. “I knew him on the ship. His friends attacked us. They cut off Nikanj’s arm. The ooloi he was with, then—it never quite forgave him. I was surprised Nikanj could.”

“And he forgave it,” Margit whispered. That wasn’t precisely true. But there had been a time, she was certain, when Vidor and Lilith and Nikanj and Ahajas and Dichaan had been happy together. “Humans are very strange.”

“You’re the construct,” it said, “the bridge. It’s your job to make sense of them.”

She thought she was beginning to—both in what she had explored of Vidor and in what she had felt, herself, when the snake had died. She had not wanted to kill it. She had felt guilt for its death. But there had been a moment when she had touched it that she had felt strong, powerful. It was a human feeling, one she distrusted—but it was a part of her. And it had saved Vidor. There were things she could gain from her human side, if she did not reject it wholesale. That was what made it a trade.

Tehkorahs left them alone in the guesthouse, and Margit curled up on the cot beside her father to wait for him to wake. It was a long afternoon. She watched the palm leaf shadows shift along the far wall and counted the lizards she could hear scurrying across the floor. She touched Vidor several times, making sure he was still breathing, still healing, but she did not taste deeper. He would not like it if she did.

Vidor woke when the shadows had almost faded into indistinguishable dusk. She nudged him, and he wrapped his arms around her.

“Thank you, lelkem. I wouldn’t have made it back without you.”

“You wouldn’t have been there without me,” she pointed out. “And thank you. I think I understand you better, now.”

He squeezed her tighter.

“There’s one thing you said that I don’t understand,” Margit said slowly. “You said you loved all your kids, but especially me. Why me?” She had not known, before he’d said that, that he had children with his other family, but she had assumed it. No ooloi would let its mates remain childless for long.

“Oh, Margit.” Vidor laughed a bit, then stopped. “It’s a thing humans say. We want our children all to feel loved. And we have only words to show it with, not like you Oankali.” He was quiet for a long time after that, and she listened to his heartbeat, steady and reassuring. “There’s a little more to it,” he admitted finally. “I love all my children. I love my mates. My ooloi would never let me do anything less. You know? But you—no ooloi is making me love you. Nikanj won’t even speak with me. The other Oankali don’t understand why I come back. I know I love you because of something in _me_. And that makes it easier to believe my feelings for my other children are true.”

“Oh.” It did not make much sense to her. She knew humans distinguished between things they felt without ooloi and things they felt when ooloi were present, but to her they were all feelings—all natural, all true. But perhaps it was like the difference between how she felt when she was with her father, and could sense his familiar and comforting scent, and how she felt when she looked at the doll he had given her—not the part-of-me feeling that she associated with love, but happiness all the same. “Father? I still want to show you the tree.”

“Of course, Margit. The next time I visit. I promise.”

“And father?” She had never said this, not out loud. It was not an Oankali thing to say. Oankali simply knew. But she was starting to understand what it might mean, to a human. “I love you.”

“I know you do, lelkem. I know.” He kissed her softly on the forehead and, as the last of the light faded, fell back asleep.


End file.
